Forced Marriage

Last August, the world watched in horror as the extremist armed group Islamic State, also known as ISIS, attacked Iraq’s Yezidi community. Thousands fled without food or water into the nearby Sinjar mountains, but ISIS fighters waylaid many, executing men and abducting thousands of people, mainly women and children. Rumors of forced marriage and enslavement of Yezidi girls and women swirled, and were later confirmed as a trickle of women and girls – now numbering into the hundreds – escaped. Human Rights Watch researchers Samer Muscati andRothna Begum interviewed 20 of these women and girls and shared their findings with Amy Braunschweiger.

Forced marriage is one of the last taboos to break. A new law could make it a crime. So why do those who champion prevention oppose it?

20 Feb 14 - A proposal to toughen legislation on the practice of “bride stealing” in Kazakstan has reignited debate on a practice that has proved difficult to tackle. Svetlana Romanovskaya, a member of parliament from the ruling Nur Otan party, wants to see stricter measures to criminalise abductions that lead to forced marriages.

In a typical case, a woman is grabbed off the street by male relatives of the would-be groom – who might be a complete stranger – taken by force to his home, and held there against her will until she agrees to marry him. Fear of being shamed will often lead her own family to come to terms with the forced marriage.

ISLAMABAD: The Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) concluded its 191th meeting, here Tuesday with the ruling that the laws related to minimum age of marriage were un-Islamic and that children of any age could get married if they attain puberty.

In 2012, a two-part study on the state of forced marriage was undertaken by Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) for its program on culturally-justified violence against women, supported by the Women’s Empowerment and Leadership Development for Democratisation (WELDD) consortium. This report is the documentation of that study and was subsequently revised as WLUML’s submission to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) for its report on preventing and eliminating child, early and forced marriage.

Each day before the reaping, the 11-year-old girl walked between the stunted stalks of millet with a sense of mounting dread. In a normal year, the green shoots vaulted out of the ground and rose as high as 13 feet (4 meters), a wall tall enough to conceal an adult man. This time, they only reached her waist. Even the tallest plant in her family's plot barely grazed her shoulder. Zali could feel the tug of the invisible thread tying her fate to that of the land. As the world closed in around her, she knew that this time the bad harvest would mean more than just hunger.

The practice of men marrying underage girls - which has been an accepted social norm for centuries but has been linked in recent years to the spread of HIV - was recently declared illegal in Swaziland.

Hajji Rais Khan, a white bearded resident of Nangarhar’s Dur Baba district, needed only to remove his false teeth and hand over 3,000 dollars to conclude the swift purchase of a young woman for his bride.